The prior art has disclosed various interactive information handling systems which store electronic documents. These systems vary in complexity and sophistication from the very simple personal computer employed in the home for writing letters to the very large main frame data processing systems in which thousands of users nodes interact with each other and with a centralized library or file of information. An example of a sophisticated system that is currently in use by several large governmental agencies and private corporations is the systems referred to as PROFS that is marketed by the IBM Corporation. These types of systems store and manage millions of documents ranging from one page memos and messages to multi-page reports that might involve several printed volumes. In many of these systems, the need for hard copy no longer exists, so the only copy of the information is the originally generated electronic copy.
The management and control of the paper flow in any large enterprise, be it a governmental agency or a private corporation, requires a set of procedures which define how various types of communications or documents are to be handled. This is a necessity in both manually implemented systems which deal in nothing but hard copy as well as electronically implemented systems that deal only with electronic copies.
It is generally recognized by both types of systems, that there are two basic document control strategies that must be enforced in order to have an effective and efficient system. The first is that documents that are no longer needed should be deleted from the system as soon as possible and the second is that a document that is required should be maintained as long as it is needed by the document owner or the enterprise.
It is obvious that in implementing these two basic concepts it is not always possible to obtain an agreement, much less a consensus, on such items as to who makes the decision to keep or delete a document, does this decision apply to all document types or does it change with the type of document, can there be exceptions and changes in the criteria, who determines the time period for document types, etc.
The prior art systems that involve a large number of users who create electronic documents that are stored in the system at a logically centralized location, do generally impose a number of structured formatting constraints on the manner by which documents are identified in the system. In most systems, some type of manual document classification system is established, either on a formal basis or a de facto basis. A bank might use a functional business classification for documents. For example a customer's loan folder might include a "loan application", a "credit history", a "payment history" etc. These various documents have different retention requirements and there is generally no provision made to permit any deviations from the established retention criteria. In prior art system, a search is performed on a specific term contained in a plurality of documents and documents are deleted based thereon. The term may have a different meaning within each of the documents. Thus, this form of document management may result in the deletion of document which should be retained or the omission of documents which do not contain the term and should be deleted.
A batch type of approach to document retention, where the date to delete the document is controlled by the enterprise, creates a problem when the date has to be changed. If the date that the document is to be deleted is shortened, there are undoubtedly some persons who are relying on the fact that the document is to be available up to the previously established date. How does the system administrator evaluate whether these documents can be destroyed. If the documents are deleted there is likely to be some direct adverse consequence to those persons who were relying on the document for their work. A more serious long term consequence however results when documents are destroyed early, in that there is a loss of integrity of the system which soon results in users operating their own backup document storage system which defeats the many advantages of a centralized system.
It is therefore important in electronic document storage systems to provide the user with as much flexibility as possible in as many areas as possible. The problem of providing flexibility to the user however almost always adds to the complexity of the process and requires the user to obtain and retain an understanding of all the various options available and the nuances of their differences. It is extremely important to have the data that is used to manage the retention and deletion of the documents, entered correctly into the system. The data entry process for the end user of the system must therefore be simple to use, yet permit a more sophisticated user to take advantage of the more advance features. The data entry process must also be fail safe to insure that only valid descriptors are entered into the system.
The present invention is directed to an improved method for use in an interactive information handling system in which the data entry process for the descriptors that are used in the retention and deletion of documents is simple, flexible, and fail safe, and therefore avoids many of the problems that occur with the prior art document storage systems.